A brilliant text brilliantly
interpreted and excitingly performed – there is very little about
Conor Lovett's solo show that does not inspire superlatives.

With the
aid of director Judy Hegarty Lovett, the actor has transformed Samuel
Beckett's early story into a darkly comic monologue so spellbinding
that its hour and twenty minutes seem to go by in less than half that
length.

As is his wont, Beckett writes of a minimal human being in
minimal circumstances, in this case a man so unaccustomed to human
contact that just speaking to us is a novelty that causes him to
repeatedly pause in wonder.

He tells us of his one relationship with
a woman – if by 'relationship' you understand that they shared a
park bench a few times and he lived in her home for a while in a
separate room she was not welcome to enter.

But of course, out of
that kind of minimalism are Beckett lives made up. It will come as
little surprise to Beckett veterans that the speaker finds graveyards
amenable places to spend his time, that he notes ruefully that 'dust
to dust' might more accurately specify muck, and that it is not just
alliteration that makes him think of food and fumigating together.

Lest this sound bleak, I rush to repeat that the monologue is filled
with comedy, in both the man's bizarre experiences, his skewed vision
and the personality Conor Lovett finds for him.

Lovett embodies the
man so fully, from voice to body language to pacing, that it is worth
reminding ourselves that he is working from a narrative text without
stage directions, finding his entire characterisation and performance
in the words he speaks.

So when he realises, for example, that such a
man would be as unaccustomed to sustained thought as to extended
conversation, and has the guy wander off from time to time into a
blankness from which he has to stir himself, it rings absolutely true
as well as being dramatically alive.

(It is also very daring – a
couple of times Lovett holds a silence so long that you begin to fear
the actor has forgotten a line, only to wake the character up again
at the last possible moment and thereby demonstrate his complete
control over what he's doing.)

An all-but-bare stage, a single actor
and a text – and this is one of the most engrossing, captivating
and thoroughly entertaining evenings I've had in a theatre all year.

Gerald
Berkowitz

This production of First Love was done at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2010. Here's what we said about it then:

The
key to Samuel Beckett monologues is recognising that there's a real
human being in there. He may be strange or damaged or even mad, but you
have to find him and his voice, or else you may as well be reciting
meaningless abstract poetry. Conor Lovett finds the man whose voice
speaks Beckett's 1945 short story and presents him to us fully formed
even before he says a word. The slight stoop, the sideways stance and
the wavering eye contact introduce us to a man for whom human contact
is an infrequent and, if not actually painful, at least not always
welcome experience. Once he begins to speak and we catch on to thought
patterns like being halfway through reminiscence before realising it
may not actually have happened, or randomly changing details or names
because facts have no monopoly on his concept of reality, we are ready
for the tale he has to tell. His love story turns out to involve a
woman who suddenly appeared on his favourite park bench. Because she
bothered him, he thought about her; because he thought about her he
concluded that he must be feeling that thing other people call love.
What follows is a minimalist misadventure that is the purest Beckett,
with Lovett capturing every nuance, every bizarre laugh and every tiny
tragedy, sharing and communicating his absolute understanding of the
text. It is easy to do Beckett poorly and get away with it, but the
opportunity to see him interpreted this well is too rare to be missed.